George Condo

George Condo
Portrait of the artist by Sophie Caby in 2012.
Born	1957 (1957) Concord, New Hampshire
Nationality	American
Education	University of Massachusetts Lowell
Known for	Painting
Spouse(s)	Anna Condo
Awards	Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Francis J. Greenberger Award

George Condo (born 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire) is an American contemporary visual artist working in the mediums of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Condo studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Throughout his early life he studied guitar and composition while pursuing his lifelong interest in painting and drawing. After two years at UMass Lowell he moved to Boston where he worked in a silk screen shop and joined proto-synth/punk band The Girls with abstract painter Mark Dagley, avant garde musician Daved Hild and Robin Amos, founding member of Cul de Sac. Their first and only single, Jeffrey I Hear You/Elephant Man (1979) was produced by David 198Thomas of Pere Ubu. In 1979 Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat for the first time when the Girls opened for Basquiat’s band Gray at the downtown nightclub Tier 3. After this meeting Condo moved to Ludlow Street in New York City to pursue his career as an artist. In 1980 Condo became a founding member of the Punk/Blues band Hi Sheriffs of Blue.

In the early 1980s when he emerged in the East Village art scene, Condo coined the term Artificial Realism, “the realistic representation of that which is artificial,” to describe his hybridization of traditional European Old Master painting with a sensibility informed by American Pop. Along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Condo was instrumental in the international revival of painting from the 1980s onward. Condo’s work has been influential to many artists of his generation and the generation that followed him, including Nigel Cooke, Sean Landers, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Glenn Brown.